July 19, 2005
Practice
During the happy hour following the Eucharist Sunday, I talked with a colleague about practicing on musical instruments. She’s a real musician, plays viola in the symphony. I play cornet in a jazz band.
Putting aside that cornet and viola chops require vastly different kinds of attention, practicing is still practicing, usually altogether boring, alleviated only by watching TV, and unavoidably necessary. No less a worthy than the pianist Artur Rubenstein said that if he misses a day of practice, he knows it, if he misses two days, his friends know it, if he misses three days, the whole world knows it.
Even if they, too, have to keep at it, musicians and athletes know something that seems out of reach for most of the rest of us. For them, what most of us call work is play. On the other hand, for docs and lawyers, work is practice. Even if that’s not the most reassuring bit of information, I suppose it helps to understand why they call the rest of us patients.
If there’s anything we churchers don’t need, of course, it’s more ambiguity (just cf the parables and the evangelists insistence on allegorizing them). Hence, denominations, for example and after which we seem to lust, must be Satan’s alternative for how we can go about doing away with ambiguity. Nevertheless, all of us can always use more practice until one of these days, maybe we’ll get it right.